Data centers have become a ubiquitous element of modern IT infrastructure, especially in the services sector that requires “always-on” capability. Practically every large IT organization hosts a data center, either in-house or outsourced to major vendors. Furthermore, the recent emergence of the software as a service (SaaS) paradigm or more generically, cloud computing, coupled with emerging Web-based business, social networking and media applications and services have led to a tremendous growth in the number, size, and power densities of data centers. This increase has also been accompanied by equally tremendous increases in the amount of power required to operate cooling infrastructures of the data centers, which has also resulted in increases in the carbon footprints of the cooling infrastructures.
Conventional data centers are often configured to provide capabilities for adaptive, configurable operation at the level of each subsystem, such as power distribution, cooling, and compute server racks. The traditional approach to perform such adaptation is to conduct detailed computational fluid dynamics (CFD)-based modeling of air temperature flows through the data center. However, these traditional approaches are computationally intensive, which causes these approaches to require relatively long periods of time to implement. One result of this lengthy implementation time is that these traditional approaches are typically impractical for active cooling infrastructure control processes.